Elegant as Lanxade dressed, he wasn't the product of some languid fencing-master's salle d'armes. He was skilled, quick, and steel-wristed, and fought with the desperate savagery of a back-alley brawler, the cut-and-thrust he'd learned at sea in close-quarter murder.
They swirled about each other, leaping, stamping, and clashing. All the other pirates were down, the schooner was theirs, and his hands stood watching their captain's fight. If he stumbled or fell, looked about to lose, Lewrie was sure that a dozen muskets or pistols would take Lanxade down the next instant. Surely, Lewrie thought, Lanxade knew he was a dead man even if he won, and, tiring as Lewrie was, the issue was in doubt! Swordplay was the most strenuous and enervating way to fight, and his one-on-one "duel" with Lanxade felt like it had been going on for half an hour, not one or two minutes!
Lanxade clashed, drew him wide left, then whipped under, thrust with a mighty shout and stamp, but Lewrie met it, whipped off a flying cut-over, forcing Lanxade's longer rapier low and left, wide-open…!
Lanxade, panting and gasping as loud as Lewrie, instinctively cut right, was left high and wide, vulnerable for once, backed against the schooner's taff-rails, and Lewrie put all he had into a slash that would gut the bastard from his left hip to his right breast!
Lanxade bellowed rage and defiance, even as Lewrie's hanger cut his clothing open like a berserk tailor's razor. Blood sprang from a slash on Lanxade's left thigh, another gout from his right shoulder. Something went Twang-twang-twang! and Lanxade fell back with his sword hand on the taff-rail to recover, his stomach and belly swelling like he'd suddenly become pregnant, and Lewrie was stunned motionless for a second or two.
"Bloody Hell." Lewrie gawped.
"Merde alors!" Lanxade snarled back, using that second granted him to glance down and see his waist-coat and shirt slashed open, and the severed laces of his whale-bone corset standing out like hedgehog quills! " Sale chien!'"Lanxade screamed, shoving off the railing, and brought his rapier up in a wild slash at Lewrie's head, which he ducked, tried to slash back downwards in the blink of an eye, but that was blocked by Lewrie's right shoulder against his forearm, and Lewrie rammed the point of his hanger deep into Lanxade's stomach, no longer protected by canvas, whale-bone, or lacings, right through the gap he'd made with his slash; deep as he could, the whole length of the honed back-blade savagely twisted to ease its withdrawal. Lanxade tried to bring his own rapier back far enough to stab, but Lewrie took hold of his wrist, feeling the man's oar-stout strength going.
Lewrie looked into his eyes, glaring utter hatred, getting the same hatred back. "Fuck with my sailors, will you? My prize you took… my men you almost murdered! My Midshipman you gut-shot and left to die, you… miserable… bastard!" Lewrie raged, almost in his ear. "Now die, and roast in the fires of Hell!"
Lewrie stood back, jerked Lanxade back on his feet as he tugged his bloody hanger free, then jammed it up under Lanxade's jaw, through soft tissue and tongue, into his brain!
Lanxade jerked and jiggled like a dancing marionette at a Punch Judy show, his rapier clanging on the deck as it dropped from nerveless fingers, then he was falling backwards over the taff-rails, arms, legs, and coat jerkily windmilling as Lewrie shoved him over-side, to create a cannonball's splash as he plunged deep under. Lewrie peered down over the schooner's transom to see Lanxade surface once, strangling but incapable of movement, before he went under again, to sink slowly, lifeless eyes almost yearning for air, and the light.
Drowned, a last thought in the final dark: I died rich, hein? Lewrie spun about, sagged against the taff-rails, and peered up at the French Tricolour which still flew aloft. "Get that damned rag down, someone," he croaked, dry-mouthed and desperately weary. Cox'n Andrews came to his side with a leather bottle of brandy, and a suck or two at that helped. He was leery of the round-eyed awe his sailors showed him, but hoped that awe cancelled out his previous lost respect ashore.
"Been below, sor," Toby Jugg reported. "They's kegged silver in th' hold, not too much, though. Pris'ners say th' bulk o' h'it woz on their prize, still."
They looked West. The pirate's prize was now a half-sunk hulk, a bowl of sullen flames beneath a monstrous volcano's pillar of smoke, adrift and almost beached. Even as they watched, the fire reached the unpillaged powder magazines, its kegs and sewn cartridges at last. She exploded with a dull roar, a staggering series of blasts that shot flaming debris and fingery smoke trails up and outwards, each bigger than the rest. And with each explosion came a glittering in the sky like the coloured embers of a fireworks display; tiny, silvery bits that glinted as they spiralled out over a half-mile radius, all new-minted and mirror-like in the rising sun.
"Oh!" Lewrie lamented. "Ooh!" went his sailors. "Aw, shit!"
"Boy, you get in your brother's boat," Balfa ordered after they met up with the grim-faced Pierre in a small gig by himself. "You an' him row like Hell one way, we go dat way, dey don't cotch us all in de one bite, hein?" Balfa still had two loaded pistols in his belt, but Pierre only had one, and all the rest had been soaked useless in their swim. Bad as things looked, hard as it was to see old Jerome meet a hard end as they rowed past to the west of the fight, his neighbours still had his hillock of silver, and the fewer greedy survivors of this day, the better; especially those quick-witted La Fitte brothers.
"Row where?" Pierre snarled. "We don't know the way through…"
"Away from dis\" Balfa mirthlessly hooted. "Due north, get in Lake Barataria, skirt de shore, de bayou take you free, you stay wit' de wide channel. Get t'New Orleans, den it up to you, dat."
"We have no money, we've lost it all," Pierre carped.
"Oh, here," Balfa grudgingly said, pulling out his coin-purse and tossing the bulging sack over, pretending generosity. "Dat get ya new kits, passage outta Looziann'. Don' worry 'bout payin' me back, chers. De least a capitaine can do for good hands, hein? Go on, now. Hug de right bank, t'rough dat op'nin' dere, see it? Right bank, all de way, an' don't go wand'rin' off in a coulee. Dey be 'Cadiens live 'long dere, dey steer ya right, feed ya an' put ya up 'til ya get back t'New Orleans, an' bonne chance, chers! Maybe we go sea-rovin' again, together. Never can tell!"
Pierre weighed the bag in his hand, couldn't see that Boudreaux Balfa had another on him, and decided to make the best of what little was left him. He motioned his younger brother, Jean, to join him in his boat, and they set off. Balfa bade the morose Mademoiselle Charite take the steering oar, and he sat beside his son on a rough thwart, an oar in his hoary hands. "Let's row hard, now, Fusilier. All de way home, and say a strong prayer we get away wit' our lives, by Gar!"
"Sir! Sir!" Midshipman Larkin cried, hopping from one foot to another in excitement. "There's a rowing boat out there, sir, off the larboard bows. They're not our people, sir!"
The damnable fog had not quite dissipated, but it had thinned considerably, now more a haze that hid the horizons. Lewrie put his telescope to his eye and swept the nearer waters. There were a lot of boats, most nigh-lost in the northern haze, some to the west… ah! That'un! Two men rowing, a lad and a gammer, one man with his hair bound back in a horse-tail steering with a sweep-oar… about two miles off and going strong.